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Enemies and false friends [ Antagonism & Resistance ]

… Résumé Friendship held an important place in the long eighteenth century. But one of the major challenges of everyday life was … or treatises explicitly dealt with the subject of enmity, but it was always a central feature of the literature on friendship from this period, which contained abundant warnings about the perils of false friendship. The deepest enmities resulted from the closest friendships. Yet the candour and honesty of enemies had …

Female friendship in eighteenth-century English literature [ Feelings and Emotions ]

… Résumé The English literature of the long eighteenth century offers abundant portraits of female friendship as a frequent form of sociability among women – sometimes sentimentalised as true spiritual companionship … pure and innocent souls, sometimes demonised as a devious façade for unnatural sexual desire. As opposed to men’s friendships, which centred on socialising in the public sphere, forms of attachment among women were associated with the … lives of the Ladies of Llangollen, or literary explorations of lesbian desire, fictional portraits of female friendship in the long eighteenth century seem to have provided women with the intellectual stimulus, the emotional …

Friendship [ Social interaction / Character / Feelings and Emotions ]

… Résumé This entry explores the diverse uses of the language and concept of friendship in eighteenth-century Britain. Though obviously central to sociable thought and practice, friendship was also caught up in philosophical debates about the instrumentality of feeling and the nature of social obligation. These debates in turn extended to the political arena, in which the invocation of friendship could be suspect or ironic. Through examination of attitudes to friendship, we gain a broader sense of the …

Samuel Richardson [ Art and Literature ]

… practices, fashioned links with his readers and created a society of writers and readers based on esteem, admiration and friendship, thereby promoting a special kind of sociability, relying on the qualities of the heart and mind. People > Art and Literature Mots-clés Samuel Richardson Writing and reading practices Letter Epistolary sociability Friendship Sentiment Heart and mind Although Samuel Richardson was a reserved, taciturn man who was ill at ease in … so that the letter takes the form of a dialogue, promotes relationships founded on depth and reflection, as well as friendship based on authenticity, or, in Richardson’s words, a contract sealed between the hearts of the parties …

Mary Berry [ Art and Literature ]

… plays as well as historiographical works. She met a large number of literati, artists, and politicians and cultivated friendships with Walpole, the sculptor Anne Damer, and the playwright Joanna Baillie, documented through letters, which provided her with support. People > Art and Literature Mots-clés Travel Literature Salon Horace Walpole Epistolary friendship Mary Berry (1763-1852) headed and participated in sociable circles in London and on the continent, was a … social contacts can serve to highlight her networks: Horace Walpole, Anne Seymor Damer, and Joanna Baillie. The Berrys' friendship with (or patronage through) Walpole – writer, collector, author, creator of the mock Gothic mansion Strawberry …

John Keats [ Art and Literature ]

… his lifetime, his close circle of friends in England strove to defend his genius and preserve his memory for posterity. Friendship was always central to Keats’s life; his poetry and letters attest to a vitally social existence, and to the … thinker. People > Art and Literature Mots-clés British romanticism poetry Leigh Hunt Hunt circle literary correspondence Friendship ‘The web of our Life is of mingled Yarn,’ writes John Keats (1795-1821), echoing his presiding genius, William … and to see his poetry as both informed by and invested in the politically as well as aesthetically inflected notions of friendship and sociability circulating in literary coteries of the time. 2 . See, for example, the recent collection of …